Charles Leclerc (general, born 1772)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 14th of December 1801, Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc sailed out of Brest at the head of a fleet carrying 40,000 troops, bound for the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue. He carried a public promise from Napoleon Bonaparte that every person in Saint-Domingue was French and would remain forever free. He was carrying a very different set of private instructions. By the time Leclerc died less than a year later, he had deported the colony's governor to a mountain prison in France, presided over mass executions, and written a letter to Napoleon calling for the extermination of virtually the entire Black population of the island. What Leclerc did in Saint-Domingue would set in motion the events that produced the first free Black republic in the Western Hemisphere. How a career soldier who started as a second lieutenant in a cavalry regiment ended up at the center of one of history's most consequential colonial disasters is a story worth examining closely.

• 2. A Soldier's Rise

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  Charles Leclerc was born on the 17th of March 1772 in Pontoise, in the Île-de-France region. He volunteered for the French Royal Army in 1791, entering as a second lieutenant in the 12th Regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval. He served as aide-de-camp to Jean François Cornu de La Poype before the Revolution reshaped the army around him. Staying loyal to the new French First Republic earned him a promotion to captain, and it was in that rank that he worked as chief of staff for a Revolutionary Army division during the siege of Toulon in 1793. That siege was where he first met Napoleon Bonaparte.

  The Italian campaigns that followed gave Leclerc a chance to distinguish himself further. He fought at Castiglione and at Rivoli, battles that are still remembered as pivotal engagements of the French Revolutionary Wars, and by 1797 he had risen to the rank of brigade general. Napoleon then entrusted him with a diplomatic errand: carrying news of the Peace of Leoben back to the French Directory in Paris. That trip changed his personal life as decisively as his military service had shaped his career. Napoleon's sister Pauline had many suitors, and Napoleon wanted to choose her husband himself. When Leclerc arrived in Paris, Napoleon made him the offer, and Leclerc accepted. The couple had one child together, a son named Dermide Leclerc, and they set up their household at the Château de Montgobert.

  Leclerc's ascent continued through a series of assignments under senior commanders, including Louis-Alexandre Berthier and Guillaume Brune. He took part in the second French expedition to Ireland in 1798, led by Jean Joseph Amable Humbert. When Napoleon returned from Egypt and Syria, he promoted Leclerc to divisional general and sent him back to the Army of the Rhine, which was then under Jean Victor Marie Moreau's command. On the 9th of November 1799, the day of the Coup of 18 Brumaire, Leclerc was in the thick of it. Supported by Joachim Murat, he ordered a detachment of grenadiers to march directly into the Council of Five Hundred, the act that effectively ended the First Republic and made Napoleon First Consul of France.

• 3. The Saint-Domingue Expedition

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  In late 1801, Napoleon gave Leclerc his most consequential command. The mission was to overthrow Toussaint Louverture, the governor-general who controlled the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and restore direct French authority over the territory. Napoleon's initial instructions to Leclerc were designed around a careful deception. Publicly, Leclerc was to maintain the abolition of slavery in the colony. Privately, Napoleon planned to reinstate slavery as soon as Louverture was in French custody. In a neighboring territory, the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, Napoleon had already announced his intention to bring slavery back.

  Leclerc left Brest on the 14th of December 1801 with those 40,000 troops and the public promise that the people of Saint-Domingue would remain forever free. His opening strategy was political as much as military. Louverture had made enemies through harsh discipline, and Leclerc exploited the ambitions of Louverture's subordinate officers, promising them they would keep their ranks in the French army if they abandoned their commander. The approach worked. French forces won several victories in rapid succession, and within three months they had regained control of Saint-Domingue after fierce fighting. Louverture was forced to negotiate a surrender and was placed under house arrest on his plantations.

  But Napoleon had given Leclerc a separate, secret instruction: arrest Louverture regardless of the surrender terms. Leclerc did exactly that, detaining Louverture during a meeting and deporting him to France. Louverture died in 1803 while imprisoned at Fort de Joux in the Jura Mountains. Despite warnings from his superiors about the importance of consolidating his victory, Leclerc did not move to disarm Louverture's officers and soldiers. He incorporated many of them into his own forces instead, a decision that would unravel catastrophically within months.

• 4. Collapse and Atrocity

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  News arriving from the nearby French colony of Guadeloupe changed everything in the second half of 1802. Slavery had been reestablished there, and Haitians serving in Leclerc's army began to desert. Uprisings against French rule spread across Saint-Domingue. The prospect of slavery returning to the colony had made the French military position untenable, and Leclerc's response was to begin summarily executing suspected conspirators en masse.

  By October 1802, Leclerc put his situation and his proposed solution in writing. In a letter to Napoleon, he declared: "We must destroy all the blacks of the mountains - men and women - and spare only children under 12 years of age. We must destroy half of those in the plains and must not leave a single colored person in the colony who has worn an epaulette." In the same letter he wrote: "My soul is withered, and no joyful thought can ever make forget these hideous scenes."

  Some of the most senior Black officers in his own army defected during this period. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Pétion, and Henri Christophe all went over to the resistance. After Christophe's defection, his forces massacred several hundred Polish soldiers at Port-de-Paix. Leclerc's response was to order the arrest of all remaining Black troops serving the French in Le Cap. He had 1,000 of them executed by tying sacks of flour to their necks and pushing them off the sides of ships.

• 5. Death and What Followed

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  In November 1802, yellow fever killed Leclerc. The disease had already cut through his army, and he did not survive it. Pauline, who had accompanied him to Saint-Domingue, returned to Europe and later married the Italian nobleman Camillo Borghese, 6th Prince of Sulmona. Pauline also arranged for her first husband's body to be transported back to France, where it was buried on one of his estates.

  Leclerc's command passed to Donatien de Rochambeau, whose tactics were similarly brutal. The resistance kept building against them both. On the 18th of November 1803, François Capois defeated Rochambeau's army at the Battle of Vertières. On the 1st of January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had once served in Leclerc's own forces, proclaimed the independence of Saint-Domingue under the name Haiti.

  Back in Pontoise, where Leclerc was born, a statue was erected depicting him in French army uniform with his scabbard touching the earth. It was placed by Louis Nicolas Davout and his second wife Louise-Aimée-Julie at the top of a staircase built in 1869 by François Lemot. Standing around three metres high on a square stone pedestal inscribed in gold majuscule letters, the statue stands at the south side of Pontoise Cathedral. Jean Guillaume Moitte also made a statue of Leclerc for the Pantheon in Paris, and Charles Dupaty sculpted a fully nude figure of him for the Palace of Versailles.